Drupal Guides

Approving Requests for User Accounts

Drupal lets you, the site administrator, determine how user accounts are created on your website. You can:

• Allow site visitors to create their own accounts without approval by a site administrator.

• Allow site visitors to request an account, but require that a site administrator approve it before allowing the visitor to use the account.

• Restrict account creation to only the site administrator.

The approach you use is completely dependent on whether you allow visitors to have their own accounts. There is no reason to provide this feature if you don't provide interactive features on your site. If you provide limited capabilities for authenticated users (for example, if you don't enable permissions for any administrative features to the generic "authenticated users" category) and you don't want to be bothered with enabling user accounts, then allowing visitors to create accounts without approval is appropriate. If you want control over who has an account, then you will want to configure you site so visitors can request an account, but you must approve their requests before their accounts become active.

To set how your site handles user accounts, click on the Configuration link in the top menu, revealing the main configuration page for your site. On this page, you will see a category of options for "People and Permissions." Within this category you will see a link for Account Settings.

Click on the link to reveal the account settings configuration form, shown in Figure 4-11.

REGISTRATION AND CANCELLATION Who can register accounts?

©Administrators only OVIsitDrs

©Visitors, but administrator approval is required v" Require e-mail verification when a visitor creates an account.

New user5 will be required to validate their e-mail address prior to logging into the site, and will be assigned a system-generated password. With this setting disabled, users will be logged in immediately upon registering, and may select their own passwords during registration.

When cancelling a user account

©Disable the account and keep all content. * O Disable the account and unpublish all content. *

O Delete the account and make alt content belong tD the Anonymous user. * O Delete the account and all content. *

Users with the Select method for cancelling account or Administer users permissions can override this default method.

Figure 14-12. Account settings page

On this page, you will find a section titled Registration and Cancellation. In Figure 14-11, the option is set where visitors can request a user account, but administrator approval is required is set.

To see how this feature works, click the "Log out" link at the top right-hand corner of the page, which will return you to your site's homepage as an anonymous user (not logged into the site).

In the left column, you can see that, under the login form, there is a link for "Create new account." Click on that link to see the form where a new user can request a new account.

The visitor needs to provide a username and a valid e-mail address to create a new account. Once these values have been entered and the visitor has clicked "Create new account," Drupal redisplays your site's homepage with a message that their account is pending approval by the site administrator.

You, as the site administrator, must now enable their account. To do so, click on the People link at the top of the page to see the list of users on your site. See Figure 14-13.

Figure 14-13. New user listed as blocked

In Figure 14-12, you can see that a user account was just created for toddtomlinson, and that the user's status is set to "blocked," meaning they are blocked from logging onto the site.

If your site has several user accounts you may wish to filter the list to find only those user accounts that are blocked and hence need to be activated. To filter the list, select the last of the three drop-down menus in the "Show only users where" section, and select "blocked" from the list of options.

Next, click on the Filter button to limit the list of users shown on the page to only those that need to be activated. Click the check box next to each of the users that you wish to activate and make sure that the Update Options select list is set to "Unblock the selected users." When all users have been checked and the appropriate option selected, click on the Update button.

Once the updates have completed, click the Reset button in the "Show only users where" section to redisplay all users. Which shows that our new user, toddtomlinson, is now active. See Figure 14-14.

People ©

One of the options that you can set on the Account settings page is whether users receive e-mail notifications when their accounts are created. If you have that option enabled, when you enable an account the user is automatically notified via e-mail that their account is now ready for them to log in to the website.

0 0